Category Archives: Iraq

East Ghouta trench warfare. Good Lord that fighting looks brutal. Some truly vicious close-range trench warfare can be seen in this video. This what war looks like – the real thing. I will say that SAA and allied Palestinian, government and Arab Nationalist militias have very high morale from all the footage I have seen. It’s amazing as I am sure they are taking serious casualties. I saw a video today of a Syrian village of ~400 in 2011. 13% of its men were military age, and seven years later, almost all of them are dead, fighting for the government. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that the government forces are not taking serious casualties.

There is so much I could say about this operation. Let us just say that everything you are hearing in the US and Western media is completely biased and a lot of it is flat out lies. The civilians in the area largely support the Syrian Army and oppose the Al Qaeda-type rebels.

The rebels have been using East Ghouta for years as a base to shell Damascus. Damascus gets shelled almost every day for years now by these character. The mortars are usually just aimed at the city but in recent months a number have targeted the Russian Embassy and meeting between various Russians, military and aid organizations, in the area. It is thought that the rebels do not have the ability to target Russians with this accuracy. What is going on here is that US, Turkish, UAE, Qatari, Saudi, Jordanian and Israeli intelligence (mostly US) is working closely with the rebels in an effort to deliberately target Russians. So the US is actually killing Russians in Syria deliberately and has been doing so forever.

Mostly this shows the folly of pacifists or isolationists ever voting Republican. Republicans have been the party of the hawks ever since the Cold War and it hasn’t slowed down yet. Of course Trump shifted to ultra-hawk because he is a hard US conservative and almost all of these people are fanatical warmongers. The Republicans have been far more hawkish than the Democrats since 1946.

The Democrats may be the party of Humanitarian Bombers, but the Republicans don’t even pretend to that. Instead, it’s all about how many people you can kill, civilians or not. Civilian deaths in Syrian and Iraq skyrocketed after Trump “took the gloves off” (something Republicans always do – gloves are for soft Democratic girly men). Why was this a good thing? Why did Trump massacre all of these Syrian and Iraqi civilians and why are bloodthirsty Americans cheering for this slaughter?

When East Aleppo was liberated, there were intense negotiations at the end to rescue 12 US intelligence officers who were holed up with the Al Qaeda rebels until the bitter end. Websites even published the names of these men.

Here again, the Western media is screaming. Humanitarian corridors to evacuate civlians have been activated and regular aid convoys are getitng through. The strikes have been mostly surgical as in East Aleppo. The US is just freaking out because it’s Al Qaeda type jihadis are getting defeated in this Damascus suburb. The US wants to keep its jihadis in East Aleppo to rain mortars down on Damascus every day to show that Assad cannot even control his own capital. It’s mostly an appearances thing, but then appearances and symbolism play greater roles in warfare than most know.

There haven’t been any hospitals stricken in Ghouta. Remember when “the last hospital in East Aleppo” got destroyed 15-20 times over a period of months. It was always “the last hospital in Aleppo.” How many last hospitals in Aleppo were there? There can’t have been more than one. The artillery and airstrikes in Aleppo were mostly surgical. Many of the hospitals bombed had long since been taken over as rebel bases. This is something the US media never told you. Yes, some civilians are getting their property taken away from them, but that is because they supported the rebels. It has nothing to with ethnicity and there is no ethnic cleansing. Sunni Arabs who supported Assad are to some extent displacing Sunni Arabs who supported the rebels.

There was another false flag chemical weapons attack in Ghoutha earlier, championed by pathological liar Nicki Haley. Western officials warned of the attack earlier, a sure sign that this was another false flag. So far, all chemical weapons attacks in Syria have been rebel false flags. I have studied all of them, and I haven’t seen one attack by the Syrian government yet. The Syrian government simply does not use chemical weapons. It’s not that they are nice people. If you are a rebel or rebel supporter, you may be arrested and taken prisoner by the army and transferred to a military prison. The death rate is high in that prisoner and 10-15,000 prisoners may have already been executed, mostly by hanging. That said, chemical weapons and massacres of villagers are not the SAA’s style. They’re nasty, but they are just not that type of nasty.

Of course, a few days after the fake attack, the SAA liberated this Ghouta town and promptly discovered a chemical weapons factory. The rebels had been producing their own chemicals and then releasing them in false flag attacks as they have been doing since the start of the war. Even the US military now admits that most if not all of the chemical weapons attacks in this war so far were not done by the Syrian government. Amazing – the military tells the truth where the controlled (US Pravda) media never does.

Ghouta is 70% cleared. Many rebels have left on buses to be bussed to other rebel zones,mostly in Idlib. A number of others have taken advantage of an amnesty program that has been offered by the government for years now. Today, 10,000 civilians fled to safety via a humanitarian corridor. The rebels have been firing at these corridors for some time now, shooting at civilians who are trying to flee. A number have been killed in this way.

Great article from Global Research. I am not sure if this war is actually going to happen. Israel’s apparent causus belli for the war is because they say that Iran has built a missile factory in Lebanon. Iran has indeed built a missile factory in Lebanon. I am not sure where it is and why Israel cannot take it out. Maybe it is underground. I would guess that it is in the Bekaa Valley.

The missile count for Hezbollah is not correct. Hezbollah actually 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel. There are reports that only six of those are precision-guided, but that is not correct. I don’t know how many precision-guided missiles they have, but they have a lot more than six.

The Lebanese Army is not very good. The effective army of Lebanon is Hezbollah. That is why they had 85% support in a recent poll in Lebanon. A recent move by Hezbollah to consolidate power among itself and its allies in the Parliament actually had the support of 47% of Lebanese Christians. Hezbollah is in an alliance with, among others, General Aoun’s Christian faction. As you can see, Lebanon is a lot more complex than Christians versus Muslims.

The real enemies of Hezbollah are the Lebanese Sunnis around President Hariri. Recently he went to Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis, with a go-ahead from the US, actually kidnapped him and forced him to stay in Arabia. They also demanded that he resign from the Presidency. He resigned so they would let him go, but when he got back to Lebanon, he withdrew his resignation and once again assumed his position.

The Saudis think that Lebanon is their bitch, but they are wrong. The Hariri faction does not have wide support in Lebanon – maybe 20-25% support. The Saudis were trying to provoke a crisis in Lebanon by having Hariri resign. This might set off internal conflict in Lebanon, which the Saudis want, or it might have been to cause a crisis as an excuse to attack Lebanon. “Hariri Resigns, Calls Lebanon a Hezbollah Dictatorship” would be the headlines, and then the US, Israel or Arabia would use that as a go-ahead to be humanitarian bombers and attack Lebanon “to restore democracy.”

Make no mistake about it, the Saudis want Hezbollah gone. They also want Iran dead and gone. Neither is going anywhere soon.

Iran, Hezbollah (Lebanon), and Syria form the Axis of Resistance. These are the only three official state enemies that Israel has left. They’ve taken out Libya and Iraq. If the Houthis win in Yemen, they might join the Axis of Resistance also. The Gulf states are not friendly to Israel, but Israel does not regard them as enemy states. They even have a long term alliance with the Saudis. Israel has a peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt. However, popular opinion in both countries is dead set against Israel, but both are dictatorships that do not represent popular will.

The Israel-hostile Muslim Brotherhood was replaced by a secular dictator supported by the US, Israel, and the Saudis. The Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood because they see them as rivals who want to rule Saudi Arabia. Doctrinally, there is not much difference between the two. I believe Qatar dislikes the MB also for the same reason. The MB is huge in Jordan and occupies many seats in Parliament. Hamas is the MB of Palestine, but they never talk about that because Palestine is quite secular, and the MB is not popular there for that reason. The MB is big among Sunnis in Northern Lebanon. Of course they have always been huge in Egypt – their birthplace. Hassan al-Banna created the MB in Egypt in 1928.

Lebanon as a state absolutely hates Israel. They have no relations with them, and the two are officially still at war, as Israel never signed an armistice with Lebanon in 1949. Libya has been neutralized as a state and is no threat to Israel. The new government of Tunisia is saying that they want diplomatic relations with Israel, and this is setting off huge demonstrations in Tunisia. Algeria is not friendly with Israel, but they are no threat either. The same is true in Morocco.

Turkey is also unfriendly, but they are no threat either, and they have been working closely with the Israelis in Syria. Israeli and Turkish intelligence were embedded in Al Qaeda in Syria, along with US, Saudi, and UAE intelligence. If you recall back when Aleppo was finally being liberated, there were intense negotiations going on at the end because there were some allied intelligence officers who had taken refuge in the last holdouts of the city. This included 10-12 US intelligence agents who were embedded in Syrian Al Qaeda.

A lot of people in the region are playing a very dirty game these days!

This previously published article (December 2017) on Global Research reveals the well-calculated plan of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia on inciting a “civil war” in Lebanon to defeat Hezbollah.

Israel – seemingly leading the squad with the green signal from Washington – has just fabricated yet another grounds for war.

***

Washington’s plan to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has ultimately failed. Now Lebanon seems to be in the cross-hairs with tensions between Israel and Hezbollah on the same level that led to the 2006 Lebanon war. There is also the possibility that a new offensive against Syria that might take place as Washington maintains its troop levels in the devastated country caused by ISIS and other terrorists groups they supported. Various reports suggests that the Pentagon may reveal that there are close to 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria even though ISIS has been defeated. So why is Washington staying in Syria? Will there be another attempt to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the near future? Most likely, yes. Adding the Trump administration’s continued hostilities towards Iran, the drumbeats of a new war in the Middle East is loud and clear.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have one main objective at the moment and that is to destabilize Lebanon and attempt to defeat Hezbollah before they prepare for another offensive in Syria to remove Assad from power. Before they declare an all-out war on Iran, they must neutralize their allies, Hezbollah and Syria, which is by far an extremely difficult task to accomplish.

The Israeli government knows that it cannot defeat Hezbollah without sacrificing both its military and civilian populations. Israel needs the U.S. military for added support if their objective is to somewhat succeed. Israel and the U.S. can continue its support of ISIS and other terrorist groups to create a new civil war in Lebanon through false-flag terror operations which in a strategic sense, can lead to an internal civil war.

Can Hezbollah and the Lebanese military prevent terrorist groups from entering its territory? So far they have been successful in defeating ISIS on the Lebanon-Syria border and will most likely be successful in preventing a new U.S.-supported terrorist haven in Lebanon. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri who originally resigned from his post while visiting the Saudi Kingdom and then suspended his resignation is a sign that a political crisis has been set in motion. So what happens next?

The Curse: Lebanon’s Natural Resources and the Greater Israel Project

In the case of a devastating war on Lebanon, with a civil war intact, Israel would surely attempt to take control over Lebanon’s natural resources. Since Trump got in the White House, Israel has expanded its Jewish settlements through land seizures throughout Palestine at unprecedented levels and with the occupation of the Golan Heights (a Syrian territory), they already control a portion of oil, gas, and vital water supplies. Lebanon would be a huge bonus.

In 2013, Lebanese Energy Minister Gebran Bassil estimated that Lebanon has around 96 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and 865 million barrels of oil offshore. With Lebanon’s political chaos and Israel preparing for a long-term war with Hezbollah, all of this leads to Israel Shahak’s The Zionist Plan for the Middle East which states the intended goal for the fragmentation of Lebanon and other adversaries in the Middle East:

3) This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach’s study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties.

4) The first massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 bore this plan out to the minutest detail. The second and more barbaric and encompassing Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, aims to effect certain parts of this plan which hopes to see not only Lebanon but Syria and Jordan as well in fragments.

This ought to make mockery of Israeli public claims regarding their desire for a strong and independent Lebanese central government. More accurately, they want a Lebanese central government that sanctions their regional imperialist designs by signing a peace treaty with them. They also seek acquiescence in their designs by the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, and other Arab governments as well as by the Palestinian people. What they want and what they are planning for is not an Arab world, but a world of Arab fragments that is ready to succumb to Israeli hegemony. Hence, Oded Yinon in his essay, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980’s,” talks about “far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967” that are created by the “very stormy situation [that] surrounds Israel.

Israel is gearing up for a long and devastating war against Hezbollah, an Iranian-ally which is based in Lebanon’s southern region to deter Israel’s expansionist ideas. As Saudi Arabia (Israel’s closest ally in the region) continues its immoral and devastating war on Yemen, it is raising tensions with Iran. According to Thomas L. Friedman’s article Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last praising who he calls “M.B.S.” or Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for his reformist policies. According to Friedman:

“Iran’s “supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.”

The Trump administration’s continued support of the Saudi Monarchy which negotiated an arms deal worth billions has only emboldened the Saudi government to take an aggressive stand towards its adversaries in the Middle East namely, Iran.

Lebanon Prepares for Another War

On November 21st, Reuters published an article titled Lebanon army chief warns of Israel threat amid political crisis based on Lebanon’s Army Chief warning his troops to be on high alert concerning Israel’s aggressive behavior along the southern border. It was reported:

“Lebanon’s army chief told his soldiers on Tuesday to be extra vigilant to prevent unrest during political turmoil after the prime minister quit, and accused Israel of “aggressive” intentions across the southern frontier” despite Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s return to Lebanon and decision to put his resignation on hold.

“Troops should be ready to “thwart any attempt to exploit the current circumstances for stirring strife” and that “the exceptional political situation that Lebanon is going through requires you to exercise the highest levels of awareness.”

Israel understands that a defeat against Hezbollah and the Lebanese military will be absolutely difficult to accomplish, therefore preparations to engage Hezbollah this time will be an effort to create as much damage as possible and reduce their military capabilities, maybe in time for U.S. troops to enter the war through Syria and coordinate targets with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As I mentioned earlier, and may I add with an interesting choice of words, a report published by Reuters on November 24th suggests that the Pentagon might announce how many troops they have in Syria:

Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon could as early as Monday publicly announce that there are slightly more than 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria. They said there was always a possibility that last minute changes in schedules could delay an announcement. That is not an increase in troop numbers, just a more accurate count, as the numbers often fluctuate.

A War That No One Will Win

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), an establishment think-tank based in New York City published an article on July 30th of this year by neocon warmonger Eliot Abrams who was a deputy assistant and deputy national security adviser for President George W. Bush titled The Next Israel-Hezbollah Conflict admits that “the next war is a war that will not be “won” by Israel or Hezbollah.”

Abrams said that “Israel’s realistic war aims will not match the damage it will suffer—and the damage it will necessarily inflict” in reference to a strategic assessment by a report by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies titled Political and Military Contours of the Next Conflict with Hezbollah by Gideon Sa’ar, an Israeli politician and a former Likud member of the Knesset, and Ron Tira, a strategist, Israeli Air Force officer and pilot, highlights what Israel’s realistic goals should be:

Israel’s objectives in a future conflict will be derived first and foremost from what it wants to achieve in the distinct context (such as, for example, preventing Hezbollah’s buildup of certain qualitative edge capabilities or preventing deployment of high quality Iranian weapon systems in Syria).

But a review of the fundamental data reveals a few “generic” objectives that could be applicable in many contexts: postponing the following conflict, shaping the rules for the routine times that will follow the conflict, increasing deterrence with respect to Hezbollah and third parties, undermining the attractiveness of Hezbollah’s war paradigm (use of rockets and missiles hidden among the civilian population), preserving Israel’s relations with its allies, and creating the conditions to reduce Iranian involvement in the post-war reconstruction of Lebanon, as well as imposing new and enforceable restrictions on the freedom of access of the Iran-Alawite-Hezbollah axis.

The strategic assessment mentioned what realistic goals Israel can achieve when the conflict takes place according to the assessment:

There is only a limited range of “positive” and achievable objectives that Israel can hope to attain from Hezbollah and from Lebanon. While the purpose of an armed conflict is always political, in many contexts it is hard to find a political objective that is both meaningful and achievable at a reasonable cost, and that is the reason for the basic lack of value that can be found in an Israel- Hezbollah military conflict.

The reason that an Israeli defeat over Hezbollah is impossible according to Mr. Abrams’s conclusion is because of Russia’s presence in the region:

That’s because Russia cannot be expelled, Lebanon will remain roughly half-Shia, and Hezbollah will survive—as will its relationship with Iran. After the war, the best assumption would be that Hezbollah will rebuild as it did after 2006. But Hezbollah would achieve nothing positive in such a conflict, suffering immense damage and bringing immense destruction upon Lebanon. Its only possible “gain” is the damage it would inflict on Israel. In a way this is the only “good news.”

Israel’s Economy During Wartime

David Rosenberg’s opinion piece Israel’s Next War: We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet on the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict in the Israel-based news source Haaretz explains the consequences of war and how it effects Israel’s economy. Rosenberg said that:

In 2014, the missile war wasn’t a threat so much as a spectacle, as Israelis watched Iron Dome missiles bring down Qassam rockets, to applause. Score one for the home team.

However, Rosenberg claims that the next war with Hezbollah will be different, in fact it will effect Israel’s economy in several ways:

The next war isn’t going to look like that. The round figure everyone uses for Hezbollah’s missile arsenal is 100,000. That is a suspiciously round figure and is probably wrong, but no one disputes that the Shiite militia is well-armed, and more importantly, many of its missiles carry much more powerful warheads and are much more accurate than they were in 2006. Hezbollah’s arsenal includes attack drones and coast-to-sea missiles, too. For its part, Israel is also better prepared. Iron Dome, which is designed to bring down short-range rockets, has been complemented by the introduction of the David’s Sling and Arrow systems, designed to intercept long-range rockets and ballistic missiles, respectively.

But against an onslaught of thousands of missiles, no Domes, Slings or Arrows will be able to provide the kind of defense Israelis have grown used to. Israel’s infrastructure and economic activity are vulnerable to even a limited missile attack from Hezbollah. Geographically, Israel is a small country with no hinterland, which means facilities for electric power and water are concentrated in small areas. More than a quarter of electric power is generated at just two sites. Natural gas is produced at a single offshore field and delivered via a single pipeline. A large portion of our exports derive from a single industrial plant. A prolonged missile war will almost certainly bring business to a halt.

Israel’s economy will shrink within a short-time period, according to Rosenberg:

In the worst-case scenario, a post-war Israel would no longer be seen by global investors and businesses as a safe place to put their money and do deals. Imagine Startup Nation without the constant flow of cross-border capital and mergers and acquisitions. The fantasy land of the last 11 years would disappear in a matter of days or weeks.

Rosenberg is correct. For example, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict, Israel was faced with economic uncertainties. The Times of Israel published an article during the conflict with an appropriate title War depresses people, economy; strong shekel harmful clarified what experts said on how the economy would be effected during a “drawn-out” conflict:

Experts temper the pessimism by noting that in the past, the Israeli economy has been resilient. If the current conflict is resolved quickly, there may be little cause for concern. On the other hand, a drawn out conflict in Gaza may cause investors to worry about the country’s stability and could cause long term damage to Israel’s reputation and position as a key player in the global economy.

“Our key concerns are the openness of the Israeli economy and our ability to be a key player in the global markets,” Zvi Eckstein, former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel and dean of the School of Economics at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). Herzliya noted in an interview with The Times of Israel. “It’s really still a key uncertainty how the conflict will end up,” said Eckstein. “Most people predict we will get back to the same relatively stable geopolitical situation as we were in early July, and if so, I would say the economy would rebound back later next year. But if not, the threat to Israel’s economy would be quite devastating.”

That conflict was against a weaker adversary, Hamas. For starters, a war with Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Syria however would have a negative impact on Israel’s tourism industry where it receives more than 3 million tourists (mainly from the U.S. and Europe) per year. Israel’s level of production will also take a hit. The Street published an interesting article How Is Israel’s Economy Affected by the Current War? explaining what happened to Israel’s economy during the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict:

The Israeli economy suffers directly from reductions in productivity every time missile alert sirens send the country’s residents into bomb shelters. The economic costs of the war are estimated upwards of $2.9 billion, and already the war has soaked up 1.2% of the GDP. In the event that quiet prevails after a ceasefire is reached, the Israeli economy is resilient enough to withstand the costs of this operation.

History reflects that the Israeli economy surged at a rate of 6% prior to the 2006 Lebanon war and then slowed down to 2.9% prior to this current conflict. The tourism sector is going to be particularly hard hit, and if a third Intifada ensues, the economic costs for Israel could be crippling. Since a big chunk of Israel’s workforce is enlisted in the IDF, productivity declines are widespread and costs are mounting. The IMA (Israel Manufacturers Association) has already listed a figure of $240 million in losses as a result of the war effort.

Another War, Another Tragedy

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. want to permanently eliminate the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance, and to achieve that goal, Lebanon will have to become another Libya, causing more chaos in an already volatile situation. The only beneficiaries in this coming war are Israel and the U.S., if of course, they are victorious. The U.S. and their allies would re-establish themselves as the hegemonic power in the Middle East with absolute control over the natural resources including oil, gas, and water. Israel would also expand and conquer more territory for Greater Israel. Saudi Arabia would remain a vassal state with more political leverage over its neighbors.

And if Saudi Arabia foolishly decided to go to war with Iran, the House of Saud will inevitably collapse, since Iran is much more stronger, militarily speaking. Washington plans to keep its military presence in Syria are a signal that removing Assad from power is still on the agenda. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Trump administration (decertifying the Iran Nuclear Deal with the intention to eventually kill the deal) is a recipe for a planned long-term conflict. Israel’s economy would suffer a major setback if they were to launch an attack against Hezbollah.

Besides, the fact that a war against Hezbollah would mean that missiles would constantly strike within Israel creating a massive amount of stress on Israeli citizens and a downturn of the economy would only add another dimension to the wide-reaching full-scale war. Israel hopes that Hezbollah will be temporally neutralized until the U.S. Congress and the Trump Administration jointly approve another military and economic aid package worth billions in time to continue its wars. Then there is the possibility of a joint U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israeli orchestrated attack on Syria to remove Assad from power to ultimately isolate Iran, but with Russia and China backing Iran, it would be a no-win situation. The biggest loser in all of its foreign policy blunders is the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Israel’s plan to launch more aggressive wars against its neighbors to further an expansionist objective would come at a great cost to Israeli citizens, as their economy sinks into the rabbit hole, and the threat of incoming missiles from southern Lebanon makes it that much more worst. Lebanon and to an extent Israel will be once again devastated by a new war. For both sides of the border, it is a formula for disastrous consequences.

Despite being banned by Islam, many local forms of Islam developed that were outside of the original laws laid down by Mohammad. For instance, it was very common to have graveyards with gravestones in the Muslim World, especially in Central Asia. Worship of God via intercessionary saints and their temples was also quite common, especially in Northern Mesopotamia and over into Central Asia.

Both of these were associated with Sufism, the innovated Islamic form which has frankly always been the official Islam of the Sunnis of Iraq, including Saddam’s regime. Some of the later rebel groups in the Iraqi resistance were Sufis, even though Sufism is fairly quietist as far as Islam goes. Sufism is also very big in the Kurdish area, in Iran among the Shia as a Shia Sufism sanctioned all the way up to the mullah level, and of course into Afghanistan, which is really Ground Zero for this sort of shirk, innovation, etc. That some of the most fundamentalist Islam of all came out of such a central area of Islamic deviation is odd, or perhaps the fundamentalists were rebelling against all of the shirk and innovation.

It is well known outrage against all sorts of forms of shirk and heretical innovation in the Arab World that has led to the development of political Islam, the Salafists and onto Al Qaeda and ISIS. Make no mistake, the Salafists, Sunni fundamentalists, Salafists, Al Qaeda and ISIS are all products of the Arab World originally. Al Qaeda itself came out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and then on to Sudan. The spread to Central Asia, where Al Qaeda relocated to Afghanistan, was a later development in context with the Islamic revolt against the Marxist regime there beginning in 1978-79.

These Salafists are back to basics purists similar to what a lot of fundamentalist Protestants nowadays claim to be. It was also similar to the Protestant Revolt, which was actually a back to basics revolt against the Catholic Church, mostly due to corruption due to selling of indulgences, writing the books in Latin, and the Church’s great wealth. Corrupt priests are hardly Christians at all. Writing the books in Latin a language few could read led to the religion being distorted into whatever the priests wanted it to be instead of the Word itself.

Jesus’ message was go forth and bring the good news to the common man, hence the missions of the Mormons and other missionaries, the Bible translation of SIL, etc. A real Christianity would write the books in whatever language the people could read. Writing in a language that the layfolk can’t even read is anti-Christian. And indeed, the most back to basic folks in Christianity nowadays are still the Protestants, analogous to Sunnis who believe that the Koran was divine word and must not be deviated from.

In contrast, the Shia are like the Catholics. The Catholics actually believe that the Christianity must constantly be reinterpreted to go along with the times, sort of like liberal living Constitution types in Constitutional law. This itself is actually quite progressive and it is the lack of a central authority banning back to basics and mandating living Christianity that leads to almost all true literary Biblicalist fundamentalists nowadays being Protestants.

The Vatican learned its lessons early on via Galileo in being anti-science. They have changed quite a bit. For God’s sake, the Vatican even has its own astronomer!

The resistance to the theory of evolution was mostly coming from the Protestants in the years after Darwin. The Catholic Church simply went agnostic on the subject, which I believe is still doctrinal to believers who can choose to believe or not even if the Church itself says that evolution is true.

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– An old Castroite Marxist revolutionary chant from Central America and South America, with roots back especially to the great Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador (who I used to buy guns for), the URNG in Guatemala, probably the ELN in Colombia, and probably the great FARC in Colombia.

All of these movements except the FARC were “Christian Communists” or “Catholic Communists.” Most of the rank and file guerrillas all the way up to the leadership were Catholics. In Nicaragua, leader Daniel Ortega was and still is a practicing Catholic and one of the top leaders of the Sandinistas was Tomas Borge, a Catholic priest. The ELN was led by a former Catholic priest named Camilo Torres, who traded his frock for an AK-47 and led a guerrilla group in the mountains of northwestern Colombia. He was killed soon after he started the ELN in 1964. The ELN has never renounced its Catholic roots and is a de facto “Catholic Marxist” organization.

The Eastern Catholic Church or Eastern Orthodox have been much more progressive than the Catholic hierarchy, but that was not so at the beginning of the century when the Cheka executed over 12,000 top ranking Orthodox officials in first several years of the Revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church or at least many believers are quite leftwing these days. They often hobnob with Communists, Leftists and even monarchists. Even the monarchists are pretty leftwing in Russia today. Russia is a place where everyone is leftwing. There is no Right in Russia. Well actually there is, but the Right has only 10-15% support. Putin’s party is defined as “Russian conservatism” but Putin says he still believes in the ideals of Communism and socialism which he regards as very similar to the Biblical values of the Russian Orthodox Church. This marriage is not unusual and high ranking Church officials even today regularly make pro-socialist and pro-Communist remarks. Sort of ” Jesus as a Bolshevik” if you will. Stalin himself was studying to be a priest in a sen\minary of the Georgian Orthodox Church when he gave it up to be a full-time bank robber/revolutionary. The thing is that you cannot understand Stalin at all until you understand his deep background in the Orthodox religion. Although Stalin called himself an atheist, he remained deeply Orthodox in his mindset until he died. He ever revived the Church during and after the war for patriotic reasons. Stalin was very much a social conservative and his social conservatism was deeply inflected by his Georgian Orthodox seminarian roots, which he never renounced.

The Orthodox Christian churches of the Arab World have always been leftwing, along with the Church in Iran and Turkey. George Habash, founder of the Marxist PFLP in Palestine, was a Greek Orthodox. Many of the rank and file even of the PFLP armed guerrilla have always been Orthodox Christians. The Greek Orthodox SSNP in Lebanon and Syria are practically Communists. Interestingly, this was the first group to widely use suicide bombings early in 1982 and 1983 in the first years of the Lebanese Civil War. Most of the first suicide bombings, up to scores or hundreds in first few years, were by Communists, often Christian Orthodox Communists. Many of these suicide bombers were even women. It was only later that the Shia adopted the technique.

The man who created the Baath Party, the Iraqi Michel Aflaq, was an Orthodox Christian. The party had Leftist roots as an officially socialist party. Tariq Aziz, high-ranking member of Saddam’s Baath party, was an Orthodox Christian and a Leftist. Assad’s party in Syria is a Leftist party. Most Syrian Orthodox Christians are strong supporters of Assad, the Baath Party and Leftism. Recently the Syrian Defense Minister was a Christian.

The few Orthodox Christians left in Turkey are typically Leftists.

Many Greek Orthodox are Leftists. Serbian Orthodox laypeople and hierarchy long supported Milosevic, who was a Communist.

The Russians who violently split away from Ukraine in the Donbass were so Leftist that they called their new states “people’s republics.” Most of the leadership and the armed forces are Orthodox Christians. The armed groups had priests serving alongside in most cases. They often led battlefield burials for the troops.

There are deep roots of this sort of thing in Russia. Tolstoy is very Christian in an Orthodox sense, but he is also often seen as a socialist. Dostoevsky’s work is uber-Christian from an Orthodox point of view and he is not very friendly to radicals. However, before he started writing, he was arrested for Leftist revolutionary activities and sentenced to prison in Siberia. Most of his colleagues were hanged and Dostoevsky only barely escaped by the tip of his nose. Dostoevsky was not very nice to the rich either. No Russian writer of that time was, not even Turgenev. The rich destroyed 19th Century Russia. Anyone with eyes can see that. It would have been hard for any artistic heart above room temperature to not hate the Russian rich and feel sympathy for the peasantry. Turgenev’s first books were paeans to the Russian peasantry, and he was raised on an estate!

Although the Muslim Brotherhood is officially opposed to Al Qaeda and tends to take a legalist and democratic approach to obtaining power, the organization is nevertheless very radical and many radical Muslims gravitate to the MB as the only game in town. In turn, as they radicalize in the MB, the more radicalized people spin off to Al Qaeda, ISIS and other radical jihadi groups. Then some of the Al Qaeda people spin back into the Brotherhood, this time hiding their radical views.

It is not well known, but Hamas is nothing less than the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. The MB is illegal in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Qatar. They led an uprising in 1982 in Syria where 30,000 people were killed. The survivors went to Europe and also to Saudi Arabia where they met up with Egyptian MB members who were working and teaching in the Kingdom. These MB religious folk were then in turn influenced by the allegedly quietist Wahhabism, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia. The MB religious teachers then supercharged Wahhabism while Wahhabism itself radicalized the MB teachers in terms of Islamic doctrine. It was this mixture of the Ikhwan and Wahhabism that eventually morphed into bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. From and around Al Qaeda all sorts of other radical jihadi groups emerged, especially in Iraq and Syria. Most of the groups in Syria are either Al Qaeda linked or inspired or if not, are not a great deal different from Syrian Al Qaeda, now called Al Nusra.

Another origin of Al Qaeda was in Egypt where as above, the MB served as a nursery of sorts for Islamic radicals. Radicals kept spinning off the MB and forming more radicalized splits. Sayed Qutb was one of the first, and Al Qaeda is simply Qutbism writ large. He was executed by Nasser in the 1950’s.

Another split occurred in the late 1970’s, when another radical group spun off of the MB and evolved into various factions. One of these factions developed the Qutbist notion that the entire Muslim world was now living in a state of jahaliyya or pre-Islamic ignorance. The entire society of Muslim Egypt was tainted by infidel and anti-Islamic influences. Some of these people dropped out of society and went to live like hermits in caves in the desert. They saw the entire society as corrupt and evil, so they had no alternative but to completely drop out of it and live in isolated hermitage like early Christians.

It was here that Zayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian eye surgeon and bin Laden’s 2nd in command, got his start. He developed some followers in the city he lived in and he eventually dropped out of society and went to live in caves with the rest of the radicals.

Around this time, a lot of these radicals got wrapped up in plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat, mostly for the crime of making peace with Israel. The assassins, of which there were several, were ex-MB members who had spun off from the group. About 1,000 radicals were rounded up after the assassination. Al-Zawahiri was one of them. There is footage of a wild-eyed Zawahiri in a crowded jail cell with ~40 other men. He is gripping the cell bars and shouting along with many others.

After his release, Zawahiri went on to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. This and several other very radical jihadi groups waged war on the Egyptian state in the early 80’s. Zawahiri’s movement, which had ~1,500 members, was crushed by the state. Jihadis were taken out into the Egyptian desert, tied to a pole and left there. It didn’t take long for them to perish from lack of food or water. In this way, the movement was crushed. Zawahiri fled Egypt and may have taken up with bin Laden in Sudan for a while.

The remains of Islamic Jihad combined with the nascent Al Qaeda forming in the Kingdom via the mixture of Egyptian and Syrian MB and Saudi Wahhabis to form the nucleus of the early Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda got increasingly radicalized during bin Laden’s stay there. Finally both men went to Afghanistan for the Afghan jihad which radicalized huge numbers of Muslims all over the world, mostly in the Arab World. As they fought in Afghanistan, they become increasingly radicalized. Zawahiri had always argued for fighting the “near enemy” first – the secular Arab regimes, but bin Laden’s radical theory was to switch from a war only against the near enemy to a war against the “far enemy,” which bin Laden called the US for its support for Israel and the secular Arab dictatorships.

The MB is hated and outlawed in Qatar and Saudi Arabia more on the grounds of rivalry than anything else. Qatar and the Saudis see the Ikhwan as a threat to royal power. After a military coup overthrew the elected MB government in Egypt, the new leader Sisi has formed a major alliance with the Saudis and the Qataris. The Saudis have responded by flooding Sisi’s government with oil money.

In Jordan, most of the Parliament is made of the MB members, which is one reason why the powers of the Parliament have been severely limited by the King.

The MB is quite active in north Lebanon near Tripoli where Lebanon’s 20% Sunnis live. These people have become increasingly radicalized and are now engaged in open warfare with Alawis living in some of these cities. Some of these Sunnis also seem to have gone to Syria to join up with the jihadi groups. The MB in this part of Lebanon is known for its dislike of Lebanon’s Shia and Hezbollah.

The MB was formed by Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, in 1922. It is one of the oldest radical Muslim groups in the world.

Here we come Venezuela. It’s America, here to bring freedom and democracy! Open up! Let us in! We are the harbingers of freedom and human rights, so you need to be liberated with democracy so we can give you some human rights and freedom and all that jazz. And after we liberate you, boy will you have a lot of human rights! Oh man! If you survive our genocidal liberation that is!

Honestly, I just cannot understand why Venezuelan ingrates do not want to get liberated like all the rest of the countries we liberated with freedom and democracy lately. What’s 500,000-1.5 million dead if you get wonderful democracy in the end? I’m sure the Libyans, Syrians and Iraqis all appreciate that wonderful democracy we gave them.

Not to mention the Afghanis. Hell, only ~1 million of them have died since we invaded? And look at the great democracy they have now! Good thing Afghanistan is not a failed state or anything like that! Whew, we really dodged a bullet there, huh?

Syria still needs liberating, a work in progress, but isn’t it a great thing? Isn’t it better to be ruled by the Arab Spring of democracy and freedom in the areas ruled by ISIS, Al Qaeda and other radical jihadis? They allow lots of freedom and democracy in those places, I bet! Better than living under that evil dictator Assad. Can you imagine the gall of that man? He actually lets the Syrian Christians survive instead of killing them, evicting them and making them pay the jizya like the jihadist freedom fighters in ISIS and Al Qaeda do! Outrageous!

I’m sure glad we haven’t turned Syria into a failed state and a nightmare on Earth. We Americans are too nice to do that. After all, we are good. We are always good. It’s only our enemies who are bad, and they are always pure evil. Everything is black and white! America is always pure good, and its enemies are always pure evil. I’m sure glad everything is so simple! Otherwise I might get confused! After all, I’m just an idiot American! Forgive me if I can’t think! No one ever taught me to!

Iraq is already free. Yay! Freedom! Freedom fries! Down with the French! Down with the Eurotrash and their pussy human rights crap! What’s all this crap about saving lives? America isn’t here to save lives. We’re here to do the opposite. To bring freedom and democracy! Yay!

Isn’t freedom great? Bombs going off all the time, full-blown war and atrocities every time you look out the window, actual genocides going on…wow! Who wouldn’t trade a dictatorship for such wonderful things?

And look at Libya! Good thing it’s not a failed state or anything like that!

America doesn’t create failed states. We create democracies! Yay! Yay for democracy! Yay for freedom! Yay for Humanitarian Bombing! Yay for democracy at gunpoint in a hail of bullets with a side order of genocide to go! God I love America.

Tata writes: Maybe you could help me understand a phenomenon. In the Middle East and especially in the Gulf countries, homosexuality is punishable by the death penalty and decapitation. Paradoxically, I have often heard that the Arabs of the Gulf have many homo relations between them because they do not have access to women. It seems that it is rampant in the Gulf, and apparently the fear of dying does not stop them.

But I read a bizarre story about a Gulf prince who got caught in a fight in a gay nightclub in London with his lover. This guy is a hypermasculine Arab man, and he doesn’t look gay. But maybe Arabs have too much testosterone and are always horny, that’s why they put a tent on the head of their women and could fuck anything. I don’t know, it’s just a reflection.

The prince is in London, and there are no obstacles to have contacts with women, dozens of women if he want. He drives a Ferrari, he is rich, he is a prince, but he continues to go to gay nightclubs and avoids women? Why? Another rumor is of another prince from the Gulf who allegedly murdered one of his employees with whom he had gay relations. It seems that there is a mentality in the Gulf that if the guy is active rather than passive, he is not gay. Are these guys gay, bi or straight? Can a hetero sodomize a guy and be hetero nevertheless and continue to act full macho? I find this crazy and I do not understand this mentality.

I have heard that in the Arab World, you are not considered gay if you play the male role in gay sex. This is true in Morocco and Egypt at the very least. 20-30% of young Egyptian and Moroccan men have played the male role in gay sex. The guys who play the passive role are considered faggots. They are not necessarily persecuted though. It’s more that they are used sexually as a surrogate female by straight men.

William Burroughs and Paul Bowles lived in Morocco for years. Allen Ginsberg visited Burroughs in Tangier. I have also heard that Oscar Wilde went to Morocco with some other European gay men and had sex with teenage boys there. All of these men were basically gay. All of Burroughs neighbors knew that he was gay and was having sex with teenage street boys, but no one ever turned him in. I never heard the dynamics of the type of sex that Burroughs, Bowles and Wilde were engaging in with those Moroccan street boys. Apparently there was quite a bit of this going on in Moroccan society, and as long as you were very quiet about it, no one cared.

There is a lot of gay sex in Saudi Arabia. There are even quite a few of what could be termed gay bars. I am not sure of the sexual orientation of the men who are doing such things. Obviously if you prevent men from having sex with women, a lot of them are going to start screwing guys instead. That’s just the way men are.

Supposedly nothing is done about all of this gay sex in Saudi Arabia as long as they are very quiet and discreet about it. When they start getting loud about it, the authorities crack down. There were a number of arrests in Saudi Arabia recently at a gay wedding of two Saudi men getting informally married. There were female impersonators there, and the whole thing got out of hand pretty fast. The authorities raided the party and made a number of arrests.

Similarly, a group of gay men threw a wild gay party on board a boat on the Nile River recently. This was considered to be flaunting it, and these men were arrested, tried and sentenced to a few years in prison. The trial caused quite a fuss.

But I have heard that there are quite a few gay couples living quiet lives in Cairo. Everyone knows about it, and no one cares.

I read a recent article by a gay man who went to Egypt on vacation. He was on the Nile in Lower Egypt where he was renting boat boys to take him out on the river. He told how some of these teenage boys were openly propositioning him. Later he met with a gay couple living quietly in Cairo. Everyone knew about them, but it was accepted as long as they were discreet about it.

I read another piece by a gay man who went to Kuwait. He said Arab men of all ages were openly propositioning him. He was shocked at how open it all was. He went down to the beach at night, and he said there were all these gay men there cruising for sex on the beach, and quite a few of them were actually engaging in sex on the beach. No one was doing anything about it, but it all had to be kept on the down low.

Nevertheless, it is different in every country. The Shia take a very hard line against gay sex, and many gay men have been murdered in Iraq.

~8,000 gay men have been executed by the clerical regime in Iran.

In Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa saying that gay men should be killed. After that, there were a lot of murders of Iraqi gay men.

Hezbollah is normally pretty liberal about the things that they allow under the rule, but they take a hard line on male homosexuality too. They don’t kill gay men in Hezbollah areas, but they do beat them up.

Male homosexuality is not accepted at all in Palestine, and gay men are often murdered in the Palestinian areas. Some have even sought refugee status in Israel as a result of this, and Israel did grant some of them this status. Male homosexuality is frowned upon in Syria and Lebanon, but there is quite a bit of it anyway. There are quite a few gay men among the Syrian refugees in Beirut, but they live in absolute terror as male homosexuality is frowned upon on Lebanese Islamic society.

They were also persecuted in Syria. I know of one case where gay men were arrested by Assad’s regime and imprisoned for a while. They were made to have sex with each other in front of Syrian police at the jail while the police sat back and laughed and ridiculed them. Of course, ISIS has been executing gay men in areas under its control, usually by throwing them off the top of tall buildings.

I know nothing about male homosexuality in Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Sudan or in the Islamic parts of Africa. Nor do I know much about it in the rest of the Islamic World, but I do know something about male homosexuality in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is quite a complex situation. Maybe for a later post.

I’m not much of an expert on gay rights because as a straight man, the subject does not interest me much.

However, it has long been rumored that the leader of Oman is a gay. He has never admitted it, but many think he is anyway. I understand that people in Oman don’t care much one way or the other about their ruler being gay.

Mr. Kim is a very smart man. He doesn’t trust one damn thing we see because any promise America gives to any other nation is obviously completely worthless.

Are we ripping up treaties yet? We’ve been backstabbers forever. If I led a foreign nation, I would never sign any agreement with the US about anything ever. We simply cannot be trusted to keep our word about anything.

White the House of Saud was conquering most of the peninsula for the princes around 1920, British warplanes under Winston Churchill were bombing all of these areas, leveling whole cities and massacring countless civilians. Much of the Hijaz was leveled as this region had always hated and the Najdis now in power as the House. All of the gorgeous architecture was leveled by Saud’s Wahhabi warriors from the Najd because the Wahhabis felt that anything but the most drab architecture was sacrilegious. Hijazis were massacred in huge numbers and piles of bodies lay on the ground.

The Najdis had to impose their will be force as Wahhabism had only been popular in the Najd and was widely disliked everywhere else, especially in the Hejaz where a much more peaceful, tolerant and artistic form of Islam (almost Sufi-like) had long held sway. The Wahhabis conquered that whole peninsula at the point of a sword. Everyone who resisted or imposed them was executed. The death toll was gruesome. Of course the British helped the whole way, offering needed help to kill more civilians and level more sacreligiously beautiful buildings.

At the same time, Iraqis were in armed rebellion against British colonial rule in Iraq. The charming Churchill responded by bombing them with chemical weapons. Yes, not only Saddam gassed Iraqis. The first man to gas the Arabs was Winston Churchill.

Churchill was a real bastard. He was a mean old coot and a reactionary to boot. He was also depressed most of his fat miserable life. He called it his “black dog.” It descended on him most mornings and lasted most of the day. That sounds like melancholic depression, as that is worse in the mornings. He was also a profoundly racist man. Read some of his statements about Jews and Arabs. Pitiful.

Forced to choose between loyalty to the homeland and loyalty to the tribe, Jews have traditionally chosen treason. This is the poison pill of anti-Zionism, for it throws the Jews back into the Diaspora where they may revert back to their normal treacherous role. On the other hand, Zionism has not solved the problem of Jewish disloyalty and dual loyalty. In fact, it has worsened it by orders of magnitude. Whereas before Zionism Jews may have been mildly treasonous, afterwards Jewish treason went through the roof as Jews captured nation after nation throughout the West and turned one White country after another into a colony of Israel.

All things considered, I think Jews would be much less treasonous without a Jewish state.

So yes, the dismantling of Zionism would throw the Jews back into the Diaspora and bring back the boogeyman of Jewish dual loyalty. But Zionism has morphed the dual loyalty monster into a titan. All in all, I feel that Jewish dual loyalty would radically diminish if the Jews no longer had a state that they could use to drag generations of White Gentiles into fighting and dying for them in the endless Wars for the Jews we see playing out across the land, in Iraq, then in Libya, next in Yemen and now in Syria and soon to be Iran. Lebanon? Been there, done that. 323 Marines died in that War for the Jews.